Leader survival has been addressed mainly by international relations students, while regime survival and government survival have been dealt with mainly by comparativists. Most stud- ies that examine leaders' survival neglect how their constituents (both voters and nonvoters) view the leaders' competence, parties' representation and accountability of political systems, and how the electorates' behaviors, both conventional and unconventional, instigate politi- cal instability that may substantially increase the risk of deposition. I adopt a theoretical structure of the selectorate theory proposed by Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003), but adapt it as well by focusing on the role of the masses. By using individual-level data sets such as the World Values Survey, Afro-Barometer, and Asian-Barometer (Chapter 3), and the Korea Social Science Data (Chapter 4), the effect of electoral politics on political trust and a leader's survival is examined; and the leaders' data of Archigos and other country-level data (Chapter 5) allow me to examine leaders' survival.Chapter 2 reviews literature about the potential causes of leaders' survival by focusing on elections, perceived legitimacy, and political movements. First, political legitimacy is viewed as both a consequence of voters' perception of the selectorate institutions and as a cause for leaders to secure the support of citizens. Finally, leaders' survival is understood in the context of mass political movement and voters' electoral behavior.Chapter 3 argues that the loyalty norm for each leader provides an institutional context for voters to perceive how legitimate their system is. For the mass public, a multilevel analysis shows that the institutional legacy of the loyalty norm matters for electoral winners and non- partisans as much as the short-term loyalty norm for electoral losers. This is because the mass public's attitudes rely on their memory of how often leadership turnover has occurredin the polity while the leader's behavior is more based upon the short-term loyalty norm. In Chapter 4, South Korea's impeachment experience illustrates how electoral politics and partisan status affect the citizen's perception of a president's impeachment at the indi- vidual level. Admitting a limitation of the validity of variables measured at the aggregate level, especially for the loyalty norm measure, I take advantage of the unique experiment- like impeachment process in South Korea in 2004. South Korea's recent experience of the impeachment provides differing responses by partisans and non-partisans. Loyalty to the Uri Party and partisan status influence voters' impeachment support. As partisans are more likely to have any preferences for the issue of impeachment, they are labeled ranging from "loyal", to "dissenting", to "defecting". In contrast to partisans' wide range of impeachment support, non-partisans' moderate level change of the impeachment support illustrates two types of non-partisans: sympathetic and ideological non-partisan. This means that ideol- ogy matters when a fledgling incumbent party tries to hold non-partisans' interests in the conservative party system. Chapter 5 supposes that stability in leader survival is the key interest to a leader herself although it may not provide an accountable leader. The hypothesis to test in this chapter is whether leader longevity is influenced by mass movement that is indicated as electoral behavior, or depends on a leader's strategy of survival determined by the loyalty norm institution. Based on a composite data set that provides information on electoral politics and the winning coalition institution, I employ three measures of electoral and social stability - the level of mass threats, electoral non-participation, and electoral competition - to test these hypotheses. The empirical findings indicate that electoral non-participation and mass threats are key determinants to the risk of leader deposition, while the leader herself has room to manipulate the risk by constraining the level of mass media.
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